A screenwriter who keeps going back to the German past at the point just before it gives way, and who has spent a decade writing it with two other people. Babylon Berlin is handsome, crowded television, and we recommend it with a warning attached.
Fi1m perspective
Berlin in 1929, four years before the Weimar Republic ends, and nobody on screen knows it. That is the best idea in Babylon Berlin (2017), and it is the idea Achim von Borries has stated most plainly himself: "Wir wollten erzählen, wie die Zeit vor dem Nationalsozialismus war", we wanted to tell what the time before National Socialism was like. Whether the idea began with him, with Tom Tykwer or with Hendrik Handloegten is impossible to say, because the three of them created the series and share the writing and the directing, and no credit tells you who wrote which line. That is the first thing to know about von Borries. He is a writer whose best work has three names on it.
He studied history, political science and philosophy in Berlin before he went to film school, and the history has never left the work. He co-wrote Good Bye, Lenin (2003) for Wolfgang Becker, a comedy about a son hiding political upheaval from his mother, and we found it funny and affecting, held together by Daniel Brühl and Katrin Sass even when the story stretched further than the premise comfortably allowed. He then directed Love in Thoughts (2004), a youth drama set in the 1920s, and 4 Days in May (2011), set as the war ends, and wrote the screenplay for Alone in Berlin (2016), from Hans Fallada's novel. Look at the dates in those stories rather than the dates on the films: the twenties, 1945, 1989. He writes about the last months before something ends.
From around 2013 that interest had one address. Babylon Berlin adapts Volker Kutscher's crime novels into a police procedural, a political thriller and a portrait of a city, all at once, and its makers have called it a social picture dressed as a crime story. The research shows in every room and the dressing holds. The plot does not. The first sixteen episodes ask you to carry more story than they can, and the reviews of the fourth season made the same complaint, so it is not a fault the writers grew out of. We finished those first two runs tired and cross about being tired, and still unwilling to leave its Berlin, and both feelings were the writers' doing.
The series ended with its fifth season in 2026, which leaves a question. Von Borries has directed on his own and written on his own, and neither of those films is the one people know him for. It would be worth seeing what he does with the pen when nobody else is holding it.
Biography
Achim von Borries is a German screenwriter and film director. Born in Munich in 1968, he studied history, political science and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin before training in directing at the German Film and Television Academy (dffb) in Berlin.
He collaborated on the screenplay for the 2003 feature Good Bye, Lenin!. Von Borries wrote and directed his debut feature England! (2000), which premiered at festivals and won awards including from the German Film Critics. Subsequent directorial work includes Love in Thoughts (2004) and 4 Days in May (2011). He has also written for children’s films such as The Three Robbers (2007) and contributed to the series Babylon Berlin as writer and director.
